Leeches are back, according to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where they are used to help wounds drain. Says the center, “The leeches are economical (about $6 apiece) and easy to apply (they feed for 20 to 40 minutes then drop off).” Best of all, “They leave a bite mark that looks like the Mercedes Benz logo.”
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“South Shore Bank doesn’t look out of the ordinary,” writes Mark Satin in the New Options newsletter (March 28). “But it’s the ‘Development Deposits’ that separate South Shore from all other banks [and] support South Shore’s innovative urban lending program–which has directed over $85 million in credit to neighborhood residents to rehabilitate run-down housing, pay college tuition and finance small businesses and non-profit organizations.” While many local banks take neighborhood deposits and lend them elsewhere, explains senior vice president Joan Shapiro, South Shore says to investors, “If you put your money in our neighborhood, we will apply those resources to redevelop our disinvested community.”
“Since Adam and Eve complained about Cain and Abel,” writes Andrew Greeley in the Chicago-based Critic (Spring 1988), “each generation has thought that the one following it is different, inexplicable, and a sign of the deterioration of the human species.” Cain–the great example of boys will be boys.
How about those scavengers raiding the city-provided blue recycling crates in the Beverly neighborhood, recycling the old newspapers, cans, and bottles therein for their own profit? According to Nate Lee in New City (March 24), they aren’t a problem but “a solution in disguise. The scavengers in Beverly are an indication that there is not enough garbage to go around. . . . All we need to do is invest in a lot more blue crates, sure bait to all those who want to get into the act. The city would pretend that it is going to pick up the recyclable garbage just to encourage the scavengers to work fast to beat ‘government’. . . . Then we can call the scavengers businessmen.”
